


Playing Basketball with God, and Other Short Stories

by theseourbodies



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Akashi still gets fucked up about kuroko and basketball, Future Fic, Introspection, Other, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 12:58:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17426330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: It is for all of you,says the inscription. It is simply signed,Tetsuya.Seijurou reschedules three meetings with a few messages and one pointed email, and takes a seat on the sofa in a corner of his office with the best light. Carefully, he cracks the spine open on the first story, and starts reading.[alternate title: a good day to dunk hard]





	Playing Basketball with God, and Other Short Stories

As a rule, Seijurou does not consume popular fiction. He has a passing awareness of trends and the current best sellers; he reads a synopsis of each weeks top twenty fiction and non-fiction books carefully enough to make educated guesses about the plots, and then turns to something more important. However, this is not a book title on a list next to a thumbnail image of its cover and an over-inflated, over-exuberant critic’s review. This is a plain, perfect-bound novella with a nice satin finish on its plain black cover. It had appeared on his desk, presumably taken from the package that it had been sent in by the security check. The font on the black cover is white, stark, and oversized, aligned to the left; the author’s name is smaller, aligned to the right. It’s very on trend. It’s very minimalist. He likes it.

_Playing basketball with god, and other short stories_ _._

On the inside, there is a neat inscription; he hadn’t recognized the author’s name on the cover, but the note is addressed to Akashi-kun.

_I would not read too much in to this narrative, but I do hope that you read it. It is for all of you._

Below the inscription, the author has printed their name. It does not match the name on the front cover, but he is not a stupid man. Even if he was, the dedication that is printed in the same stark print as the cover under the inscription is more than enough of a clue:

 _To the miracles I’ve had the privilege of seeing in my life. To my team and my friends, thank you._  

For most readers, it most likely seems like a quirky line penned by an author who is trying to seem mysterious. To a reader who is perhaps a basketball enthusiast, or to someone who had had the misfortune of playing against Teikou middle school’s ball club ten years ago, the dedication might make more sense.

To Akashi Seijurou and his four miraculous teammates, it means something very different, and very personal.

 _It is for all of you,_ says the inscription. It is simply signed,  _Tetsuya_.

Seijurou reschedules three meetings with a few messages and one pointed email, and takes a seat on the sofa in a corner of his office with the best light. Carefully, he cracks the spine open on the first story, and starts reading.  

Not all the stories are about basketball, but most of them are related to the game in some way. There is a short narrative told from the perspective of a young transgender woman becoming a starter in her high school ball club; there is a stylized piece about a boy’s basketball shoe and also about the transcendent nature of grief. The eponymous short story is broken in to three parts—reading them is not unlike looking at a stained-glass window, waiting breathlessly for the scene created in glass to move only to realize that it is lead-set; the effect of movement is an illusion. There is an entire five-page story that takes place in the amount of time that a player takes to dribble a ball once. Tetsuya is in all and none of them; his former teammates are similarly both absent and very present, until the second to the last story, which is simply titled “Eaten.”

When Seijurou finishes that story, he lets the book close, abandoning the last installment for the moment. He thinks about calling Tetsuya. He thinks about what he would say if he did. They speak, they are speaking, they talk to one another with satisfying regularity. He doesn’t know what he wants to say.

 _I would not read too much into the narrative,_ Tetsuya had written, but that is proving difficult. It is one thing to know that a man is observant and intelligent. It is another to open a book he has written and see yourself laid out on the page, to see your person through his eyes like this. He wonders who else he would see laid bare on these pages—it may be that he was the only one, but he suspects that if he looked again, all of them would be there, waiting to be discovered.

Seijurou settles his mind again. It takes him longer than he expected, but when he is calm again, he picks up the book and starts the last story.

When he finishes, he sets the book aside. He reaches for his phone, then sets it down again. He steps to the window and watches the sun start to descend from its peak; with the warmth on his face, he thinks about basketball and about Tetsuya.


End file.
